Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Megastars in Nowheresville

I love these two passages about music and adolescence, each capturing that blend of joy, mystery, fantasy, desperation, identification, and bittersweet reality that scored countless days and nights. The first is
"Records," from Kevin Sampsell's 2010 memoir A Common Pornography: "Two plastic record
players and a nice stack of Top 40 45s were all I needed to start my
own radio station."

My plan was to do a pirate radio show that
would broadcast to my neighborhood. Instead I just pointed my speakers
out the upstairs window and hoped the sound reached the corner.
In ﬁfth grade I started writing really bad pop song lyrics. When I
wrote something I thought to be particularly hit-worthy, I’d cut out a
piece of paper in the shape of a 45, and then, after coloring in the
black wax area, I’d put the name of my song on the “label.” Some of
these hits were “Sound of Thunder,” “Rich Dude,” and “Diamond Girl." The
name I gave myself was Billy Rivers, because I thought it sounded
cool.
After cutting out the center hole, I’d string
the smash hit to a hook on my ceiling. I imagined I was a megastar.
Sometimes I’d even put them on one of the turntables and watch them
spin. Forty-ﬁve revolutions per minute. Once I put a needle on one as it
spun and ruined the needle. I had to go to the record store, where they
sold little smoking pipes and stoner posters, spending my entire
ﬁve-dollar allowance on a new snap-on needle.

The second is from Bruce Springsteen's new memoir Born to Run: "I
always remember driving up the New Jersey Turnpike, and shortly before
you reached New York, somewhere out in the industrial wasteland, stood a
small concrete building."

There in the middle of the stink and marshes
hung a brightly lit radio call sign. It was just a relay station, I
suppose, but as a young tween I’d first imagined it was the real thing.
That all my favorite deejays were crowded into this one cramped shack
out here in Nowheresville. There, they were bravely pouring out over the
airwaves the sounds New jersey and your life depended upon. Was it
possible? Could this abandoned-looking little frontier fort so far from
civilization be the center of your heart’s world? Here I dreamed in the
swamps of Jersey were the mighty men and women you knew only by their
names and sounds of their voices.

1 comment:

Author of No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing (forthcoming), Field Recordings from the Inside (essays), This Must Be Where My Obsession With Infinity Began (essays), Conversations With Greil Marcus, AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, Installations (National Poetry Series), and Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band. ✸✸ Music Columnist for The Normal School. ✸✸ Five-time "Notable Essay" selection at Best American Essays. ✸✸ Associate Professor of English at Northern Illinois University.

MY BOOKS

“The collection’s 18 essays do what the best music writing is supposed to do—they make the reader care, regardless of whether they enjoy, or are familiar with, the material being written about; I was mostly willing to follow Bonomo anywhere he wanted to go.” Los Angeles Review of Books

"Joe Bonomo seems to have a Cornell box for each difficult, lyrical moment he remembers. He is a theorist of the self's construction out of the past, full of resistance and the heartbreaking urge to yield." David Lazar

"Marcus's knowledge of music and his widespread interests in related topics make this a delight and a real page-turner." The Big Takeover

"One of the five most important books about AC/DC." Jesse Fink, author of Bon: The Last Highway

"I've read most of the books about him and will now put Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found on the indispensable list. It's one of the best books about the man and his music." Lincoln Journal Star

"Joe Bonomo has written a fine book: a book not only about a band or times passed, but also about the rare virtue of endurance." Nick Tosches